Being asked to "revise, expand and re-organize the understanding and treatment of the topic" is definitely a tall order, especially when the topic in question is the "humanistic side" of "cultural geography". On first glance, it seems an extremely clearly stated case, the latter terms appear precise and specific, and they currently do have certain agreed meanings and consensual assumptions. It seems very easy to separate and distinguish "humanistic" and "physical" sides of geography. Geography, as the study of the world as perceived by (hu)man (presence) is an established academic discipline and even a professional practice, more so in recent times, has lived with this duality for a long time. What makes this task posed to us, especially articulated in the last two decades first by a marginal group in geography and then steadily appropriated as its central discourse drawing many original thinkers to it, really difficult is the larger ideological/political agenda invariably attached to it. Its aims, variously expressed, are nothing short of a complete rethinking of the dominant worldview, a proposition of a radical but "sustainable" co-existence of human and nature. The agenda has been defined and the problem one encounters is that the goals and the ambitions espoused by it transcend rigid disciplinary divisions; one has framed the problem but for solutions one has to look towards other source(s). And not surprisingly, one finds humanistic geography entering into a creative dialogue with various disciplines ranging from phenomenological thinking from philosophy, perception-cognition principles from applied psychology, descriptive/discursive techniques from (post)modern linguistics and last but not the least, the modern genre of "nature writing". It is another matter that this difficulty is more so to me personally and culturally, as the traditions of natural history, place exploration and "nature writing" with which we are presently concerned, are largely Western in origin and thus remain strange, distant and elusive to me. Much as though I have relished the exciting exchanges, the often-articulate opinions and the personal insights of the members of the seminar, at the end of it all any simple conclusion appears beyond reach. However with all these associated risks of errors and missing the point, I would attempt to summarize the discussions we had in the seminar, the authors we read, and the various discourses we critiqued.

I am struck by the fact that our object of discussion seems more a way of articulating certain values and relationships than any profession (say geography)/ theory (say phenomenology)/ praxis (say nature writing). The larger objective is to demythify and recreate an entirely different view of fundamental relationships between mankind and nature, knowledge and experience. In this regards perhaps, we subscribe to a certain sense of the world as it signifies today, which has been commonly described as the post-modern condition. We recognize that the modern/post-enlightenment condition as it existed and shaped these equations, exists no longer and we assert that these relationships must configure themselves to fit the present-day reality. Thus we subconsciously admit the lack of any empirical, timeless value system that some authors have attempted to interject in this juncture. We further attempt to articulate certain dominant and fundamental presuppositions of the existing value system, their supposedly inherent drawbacks and failings and the critical need to address these concerns. Modern "reductionism" and "objectivism" of the natural world is seen as such a presupposition, the alienation of mankind from such a world as one of the inherent weaknesses and sustainability and ecology as one of the concerns.

Here I would bring in Neil Evernden’s The Social Creation of Nature, an imaginative interdisciplinary exploration. Evernden says that we have asked the wrong questions and have been thus burdened with dangerous presuppositions.